Posted: 3/17/2005 10:34:46 AM EDT
|
BUFFALO, New York (AP) -- It was BYOTP time in Buffalo: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper. A county budget crisis left the bathrooms in a municipal office building with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare cardboard toilet paper rolls. Employees also complained the bathrooms weren't being cleaned. "It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Bob Fioretti, who has worked in Erie County's Rath Building for 21 years. "When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their hands, it's like working in another country, a bad country," he told WGRZ-TV. Fioretti said there was waste piling up in some of the toilets. A county environmental health crew went through the building Wednesday and said many of the bathrooms were clean and on the way to being restocked. Some toilets, however, looked like they had been deliberately plugged, said Kevin Montgomery, spokesman for the county Health Department. Those bathrooms remained closed while the health department awaited plumbers. "The Building and Grounds Department has been cut severely," Montgomery told The Associated Press on Thursday. Besides losing money, the department has had layoffs. "Towels and soap were running out, and that was also due to this fiscal crisis," Montgomery said. Replacement supplies couldn't be ordered until the county shifted money around. The county, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, is home to nearly 1 million people and encompasses the city of Buffalo, the weathered city that has struggled to rebuild its economy since the steel and grain mills closed down. Since the 1950s, the city has lost half its population and now numbers fewer than 300,000 people. The county has had to slash 2,000 jobs and cut services to close a $100 million-plus shortfall in its $1.1 billion budget. Rather than raise the sales tax, it cut funding for personnel, health clinics, auto bureaus, snowplowing, parks, the arts, school nurses and others services. At one point, it was possible that zoo animals would become refugees, temporarily shipped off to other zoos for lack of funding. The county came up with the money to keep the animals home. |
| What asshats. Ever notice that when private companies cut budgets, they seem to remember things like TP and soap? God people that work for the government are complete morons, sometimes. They should drastically cut salaries while they're at it, because it's obvious to me that these people aren't smart enough to make much more than minimum wage. Idiots. |
|
mind if I ask how you heard about this? I'm trying to find out how much, if any, national coverage our fucked up situation is getting The news took their cameras into the bathrooms the other night. While not the worst bathrooms I have seen, they were kind of nasty, especially for a gov't building. At every job I've had the employee bathrooms are usually not too bad. Rumor has it people are intentionally shitting and not flushing out of protest |
Glad the " workers" are pitching in and helping the situation. |
Sounds like the people who use the bathrooms are union folks. Around here (no union) we had to cut the cleaning service due to budget issues. Everyone who has an office here cleans their own now. And the labor plunges the toilet if they plug it up, restocks the TP, etc. |
www.wgrz.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=27057
|
It was on www.cnn.com Sorry I didn't put up the link |
news.google.com and enter "Buffalo". I got 96 hits back on this story. 
|
|
Buffalo is certainly circling the bowl before the final flush. Niagara Falls has already basically ceased to exist (the US one, not the Canadian one). None of that will dissuade the public employees unions from continuing to act like vampire bats on a downed cow. edit-"circling the bowl", "not circling the bowel" 
|
|
we've made it national sweet viva la tax payer revolución wben.com/newsroom/fullstory.php?newsid=02859
|